Hans Zimmer: Live in Prague

Hello, Prague.

This is sort of a little bit of my life story here.

Because the reason I start the way I start,

with my friend Richard Harvey, here on clarinet.

And the amazing Nick Glennie-Smith on...

...accordion, OK.

Thirty five years ago or maybe a little more,

just after leaving school, I met these two,

and we started making music then,

and we're still making music and...

Actually I'm not sure if it's getting any better,

but the friendship is still there

and the friendship is the important part.

So much of my life and so much of my music is all about,

you know, friendships you've made.

So let's treat this like a little dinner party,

just you and me, and we're just here, we're just having a chat,

and we're just gonna play you a bit of music.

The next thing we're gonna do is actually from a friend

that I truly seriously miss, the late great Tony Scott.

And tonight, with the amazing Czech National Choir,

we're gonna do Crimson Tide .

So yes, it wasn't all Crimson Tide .

There was a little Angels and Demons .

And tonight, I really want to make this about

the musicians that I work with.

And there's no one greater...

One of the truly, if not. . . Oh yeah, come on.

My friend Satnam Ramgotra,

the most amazing drummer I have ever had the honour...

...to ride on a bus with.

And the little devil over there is Lucy,

and she's got an angel on her shoulder named Holly.

So from one Scott brother to another Scott brother.

I'm a musician which means partly

I'm unemployable for a real job.

I'm up at night and I sleep during the day.

Or I have a 9 to 5 job which starts at 9 in the evening

and goes until 5 in the morning or something like that.

So, when somebody phones me at 9 o'clock in the morning,

I'm very, very vulnerable, and they know it.

So, Ridley Scott when he phoned me at 9 in the morning

and said to me, "Hans, do you want to do a Gladiator movie?"

I just started laughing.

Because to me a gladiator movie was men in skirts and sandals

and it was basically, we were going to do a comedy.

And he said, "It's not really like that."

And he started telling me the story,

and as he was telling me the story

I could see what amazing vision he had.

And we were really gonna do a gladiator movie

that was going to be great.

We finished talking after about an hour and I got off the phone,

and my wife's looking at me and she's going,

"What did you and Ridley talk about?"

By this point I was really excited and I said to her,

"You won't believe it but we're gonna do a gladiator movie."

And she just paused, and she looked at me and went,

"Oh, you boys."

The weird thing is that she was absolutely right.

And I told Ridley about this

and we started really questioning the idea

that we had no female soul in this movie.

We needed to get a muse.

We were talking about this in the cutting room

and Pietro Scalia our editor, he's got like three CDs,

I'm not kidding, he had three CDs on his shelf.

One of them was Dead can Dance , and he picked it up and he goes,

"What about Lisa Gerrard?"

To make the story very short, I phoned Lisa in Australia.

She said she'll come and she was going to come for three days.

And the three days turned into three months,

and the three months...

God, hang on, this was sixteen years ago.

So, we're still friends, you know.

These little movies make these little families and you get

to meet really interesting people through music.

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen,

Czarina Russell is going to do Gladiator for us.

And Mike Einziger from the band Incubus.

Guthrie Govan.

Oh, yeah, and Steve Mazzaro.

In the middle of Gladiator we've got this guitar concerto,

this crooked guitar concerto going on.

It's an experiment.

It will either work or it won't work.

But ladies and gentlemen let me not bore you any longer.

Because in the immortal words of Gladiator ,

you will not be entertained.

Here we go, Gladiator .

Ladies and gentlemen, Czarina Russell.

All right, so from Rome to Paris,

Da Vinci Code .

It wasn't really about the novel that inspired me,

the thing that really inspired me was Paris.

But what really inspired me there

was when we were shooting at the Louvre,

and then next to the Louvre is this beautiful pyramid,

this very provocative modern pyramid built by I. M. Pei.

And that really gave me

the idea of how I wanted to attack the whole thing.

Then I wrote this tune for Ron Howard

called Chevaliers de Sangreal .

I actually wrote it very quickly,

I just wouldn't play it to him forever.

Eventually he was starting to get very nervous

and I played it to him, and he loved it,

and it became really our main theme for The Da Vinci Code .

And tonight we're gonna go and do it in sort of the version

that it was originally thought of,

where we have an ancient...

No, no, you're not ancient, your instrument is ancient.

The very young Rusanda Panfili is going to be playing

her old violin, while we do a sort of electronic thing,

so you get the...

I love it when two cultures sort of collide

and then become something really interesting.

I think every sentence

is getting me more into trouble here, right?

OK, I'll just shut up. Here is Da Vinci Code .

Buyi she has such an amazing voice, she moves me.

She moves you.

But...

- From Soweto to Prague. - To Prague.

Every night we play this game,

it was a long time ago when I first met Lebo in Los Angeles.